#home-assistant

Building the security alarm panel in Home Assistant

“An arm/disarm state machine isn't optional once the sensor count crosses a threshold. With 14 security sensors and 3 modes, the alarm-panel abstraction is the only way the family can use the system without me on call.”

Ripping out vendor clouds — going local-first on Home Assistant

“When the internet went out during a March storm and the family's school + work calls all dropped, the lights, locks, and security alarm kept running. Local-first was an architectural opinion until the pandemic; now it's a requirement.”

Humidity-triggered bathroom fans — the daily automation

“Most bathroom fan switches are dumb timers. The fan needs to run until humidity is below the bedroom's level — not for a fixed 15 minutes. Dewpoint-targeting beats time-based by every measure.”

MQTT as the house's nervous system — one broker, every device

“When every device speaks to one broker instead of to each other, killing a vendor's cloud API stops being a catastrophe and becomes a footnote. You lose one device's features, not the web. That's the whole point of a nervous system — you can lose a finger without losing the hand.”

BLE presence detection — iBeacons, room by room

“Room-level presence isn't 'where is the phone.' It's 'is a human here right now.' That distinction is what makes an automation feel intentional instead of creepy — and it's also where the tech is shakiest.”

ConBee + deCONZ — taking Zigbee off the SmartThings hub

“A radio you don't control isn't local-first, no matter where the automation logic runs. The SmartThings hub was a cloud account wearing a Zigbee antenna. The ConBee is just an antenna.”

Home Assistant Lovelace — building the kitchen wall display

“The dashboard isn't a control surface, it's the front end of the smart home — the thing the family sees instead of the YAML. Build it for the five-year-old, not for yourself.”

Node-RED for the automations YAML couldn't handle

“YAML describes state well and logic badly. The moment an automation has to remember what happened five minutes ago, you want a flow you can watch execute — not a nested template you read like assembly.”

2017 review — Home Assistant arrives, and the journal goes quiet

“Local-first isn't a philosophy until the day the cloud you depend on has an outage and your lights still work. 2017 was the year I stopped trusting someone else's servers to run my house.”

Migrating the SmartThings security automation to Home Assistant

“Same automation. Sub-second latency instead of three seconds. Runs when the internet is down. Cost: a $50 Z-Wave stick and a Saturday afternoon.”

First Home Assistant install — YAML and local-first

“The pitch: everything you've been running through SmartThings's cloud now runs on a $35 board in your closet. Tonight I'm finding out if the pitch is true.”